Improved Subcarrier Selection Technique for Power Line Communications

This paper proposes Power Line Communication (PLC) schemes that improve the data rate of PLC systems while combating impairments resulting from frequency disturbances like impulse noise. Firstly, a modified subcarrier selection technique that can be employed to transmit one or more M-ary Phase-Shift Keying (MPSK) or M-ary Quadrature Amplitude Modulated (MQAM) symbols within a subset of the subcarriers of an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing symbol. The proposed subcarrier selection technique employs the cyclic rotation of a set of subcarriers, chosen from a group of subcarriers to transmit the selected MPSK or MQAM symbols. A second scheme that employs the rotation of MPSK or MQAM symbols among a group of subcarriers, to increase the data rate of the PLC system is proposed. The proposed schemes show improvement in error performance when tested over Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) and impulse noise of a PLC system despite the increase in the data rate.